What We Talk About When We Talk About Love / Beginners

Author Raymond Carver

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love / Beginners

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A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection • From one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature, the story that launched a thousand homages, in word and film—a haunting meditation on love and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is included here with its unedited version, “Beginners,” which was originally submitted to Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish. In this eShort, readers can compare both versions of this iconic work of fiction, gaining insight into Carver’s aesthetic and the foundations of the contemporary American short story.

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (a National Book Award nominee in 1977), was followed by What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984), and Where I'm Calling From in 1988, when he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died August 2, 1988, shortly after completing the poems of A New Path to the Waterfall.